I might as well hop on the Cazoo bandwagon.
Reading the Cazoo saga made me reflect on my journey with Carsnip, with the challenge of establishing a digital marketplace in the car industry.
Creating Carsnip was an interesting ‘journey’. We set out not just to offer another platform for car sales but to redefine how people search for their next vehicle.
However, despite our best efforts and significant achievements, we failed to a more considerable extent to reach our goals of being the 2nd player in UK automotive marketplaces.
We faced the single most formidable obstacle of any marketplace startup: you need to build both the supply and demand sides simultaneously!
- Carsnip Highlights:
- Introduced a cutting-edge search functionality that allowed for natural language queries, like “7 Seater for £20k near Nottingham in Black or Silver,” when AI wasn’t widely adopted.
- Surpassed Autotrader in the number of listings, securing over 750,000 unique car adverts.
- Gained the support of industry players, from dealers to CMS providers, and attracted significant investment.
We thought our offering was unique, as shown in this video of the time it took to perform searches on Autotrader and Carsnip in 2017.
Yet balancing supply and demand to scale our operations proved elusive, underscoring the intricate challenge of growing a marketplace.
Cazoo’s trajectory, while distinct, echoes similar themes. They’re navigating a complex industry and now need to forge productive relationships with dealers—relationships that are crucial but complicated by the historical competitive dynamics.
- Cazoo Challenges:
- The change to a marketplace means creating a partnership with car dealers, not the previous competition.
- Ensure that the spending on marketing retains a high volume of consumers in the market.
- Navigating the obstacles of both dealer attitudes because of an aggressive approach when they started and competing with Autotrader.
So, there is a challenge ahead for Cazoo, probably made harder by its competition with the dealers that it will now need to be its customers.
There will be no doubt more twists and turns will unfold in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, since they are unloading their stock, I thought my dealer friends might be interested in what stock they have and the total retail value by brand in this handy graph.
If you want the detailed data, just let me know.